


An Argent In A Pear Tree

by BadHidingSpot



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Christmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 14:03:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8847874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadHidingSpot/pseuds/BadHidingSpot
Summary: Chris takes Allison on a hunt.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [steamcurious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steamcurious/gifts).



Allison In A Pear Tree

Allison kept telling herself it was like “The Hunger Games” which she now regretted not bringing with her on this trip. Something to read would have made the time go faster. But her dad probably had a rule against that: “Page turning scares away prey”. This didn’t exactly match up with Allison’s impression of animals. After all her cats she had as a child had no interest in her what-so-ever unless she was tucked away in a corner trying to read or practice gymnastics. In her experience animals only wanted something to do with you while you were doing something else. She had started to use this method, in fact, to lure the cat to her so she could snatch it up and trim its nails. Thinking back, her father had been particularly impressed with her. She imagined hunters taking on this method in the woods. Each of them taking up knitting or yoga and the deers coming round to poke their noses into the yarn or chew at the mat.  
She snickered and then clapped her hand over her mouth. She didn’t know where her father was but just because she couldn’t see him did not mean he wasn’t around. Probably watching her. Probably taking notes. Probably grading her and writing a big speech on hunting and concentration to berate her with after. She did, however, prefer this method of training to his mind games and “tests” of before. She hoped he was realizing that the way his father had trained him and Kate was pretty fucked up and probably the reason that Kate was a psychopath. Allison didn’t bring this up to her dad. Some wounds were still open and not in need of salt, least of all from Allison.  
It was just them now. Thinking about trying to have a normal Christmas in the apartment made Allison sick and grateful that they, instead, had decided to do hunting exercises all weekend. Of course she would have rather spent it with Lydia shopping for everyone, or Isaac getting cozy with hot chocolate. But the idea of leaving her father alone during the holidays, even just for a few hours to be with her friends, felt like a cruelty she couldn't stand to inflict.  
He hid it well. He was good at compartmentalizing. But there was a pain that Allison could feel because it mirrored her own. None of her mom’s Christmas cookies this year, no check from her grandfather (Allison wasn’t sure she missed this exactly but it did feel strange not to receive it), and no inappropriate gift from Kate (usually a vibrator or PlayGirl magazine). Her family was strange but it was still her family and there had been a sense of normalcy every year around the holidays. There was nothing resembling normal now. The year had been strange and was bound to be stranger still next year. But it would be strange without her mom, her aunt, and with her father in a strange haze of grief that he wouldn't’ show to Allison. Allison was torn between wanting to see this; wanting to have her father to grieve and cry with, and instead wanting to be like him. To compartmentalize and not feel that pressing sorrow. Maybe if neither of them cried the grief would pass by them never gripping them with its chill. But she knew that wasn’t true because now she was crying just by the idea of it all. She sniffled and tried to wipe the tears away with her sleeve. She hated crying.  
Her walkie talkie crackled. “Allison? Sweetheart are you okay?”  
She pressed the button trying to control her voice. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”  
“Honey I can see you crying.”  
Allison looked around. “Where are you?”  
“I’m in another tree. Did you hurt yourself?”  
“No,” She assured him, “no really I’m fine.” There was a long pause of silence and then the comforting sound of crackling from the radio.  
“I fell asleep in the tree during my first hunt.”  
“What? You did not.”  
“My father threw a rock at me to knock me out of the tree.” Her father probably meant for her to laugh at this but the thought of it only seemed cruel. She couldn’t imagine Gerard really being that funny. Maybe thinking that he was funny, the same way Kate laughed at her own cruelty, but to Allison that’s all it was. “I first met your mother on that hunt.”  
“How old were you?”  
“Fifteen. Her family was visiting. Sort of a hunter gathering thing.”  
“Hunter gatherer?”  
“Very funny.” He paused for ten seconds between sentences to give Allison time to respond. She was happy for this. It meant that he didn’t want to miss anything she might ask or say. It made the conversation more precious.  
“Was that part of it? Hunting real animals?”  
“Something like that. I’d been on wolf hunts and such before then. But when Victoria and her family came it suddenly occurred to Dad-” he paused and Allison panicked a little that he’d fallen from the tree or something. “It occurred to my father that Kate and I had never been deer hunting. Something basic like that was essential to learning to hunt the supernatural.” Allison tried to imagine having so much contempt for her father that she couldn’t call him “dad” anymore. She had hated him in the way children hate their parents. And certainly in the past year or so Allison had good reason for these fits of hatred. But she had never stopped calling him “dad” or “daddy” and she’d never become so informal as to say “Chris”.  
“Was Kate good at it?”  
“A natural. Of course. She had to be the best at everything though. She was a daddy’s girl, you know? Needed to impress him.”  
“Did you mind?”  
“Not really. It meant so much more to her than to me.”  
“You didn’t want his approval?”  
“Of course I did.” Another pause. “But I knew it meant more to her. I guess I still wanted it I just gave up trying. Gave up competing with Kate for it. She was the favorite anyway. Women usually are in our family.”  
“Was mom?”  
“Gerard loved her.”  
“No, I mean with her parents.”  
A pause while Chris thought. “They loved her, of course. But no, she wasn’t the favorite.”  
“I thought parents weren’t supposed to have a favorite.”  
“That’s a lie. They do. They always do. That’s why Victoria and I decided we were only going to have one.” Allison smiled at that.  
“So who was the favorite?”  
“Her sister Elizabeth.”  
“I don’t remember you mentioning her.”  
“She died very young. A wolf bite. Killed her.”  
“How old was she?”  
“Twelve.”  
“How old was mom?”  
“Ten, I think. She was dead before I ever met your mother.” Allison could somehow picture it perfectly: her mother a young child dressed in all black for her sister’s funeral and trying not to cry in the way hunters forced their children not to cry. Then her grandparents, these two who had been dead long before Allison had met them, them too clad in black and refusing tears. Perhaps perfecting Elizabeth in their minds and holding Victoria to that ideal of perfection. And then her mother aging and trying so hard to be that despite her own grief, and always falling short of some Peter Pan figure. Victoria’s insistence on being stabbed rather than turning made more sense now to Allison.  
“She climbed into the tree to sit with me. She brought a knife and we traded knife tricks.”  
“That’s so mom.”  
“I tried to get her to play cards with me but she refused.”  
“Is that when you fell in love? Was it at first sight and everything?”  
“No,” he laughed, “that came later. We were eighteen. Then married soon after that.”  
“That was fast.” Something occurred to Allison and she blanched. “Oh god she wasn’t pregnant was she?”  
“Do the math sweetie.”  
“Just checking. Long lost family members turn up in Beacon Hills all the time.”  
“Only children seem more common.”  
“So why did you marry so soon?”  
“It’s traditional in hunter families. We don’t know how long we-” he stopped and when he spoke again Allison could hear his voice breaking, “have to live.”  
“How come Kate never married?” She felt it was a mercy to change the topic.  
“Never met anyone. She was all set to take over the family business when Gerard passed away.”  
“It must be so hard to burry your daughter,” Allison said without thinking. She was grateful to see she hadn’t pressed the talk button.  
“Maybe no one lived up to dad’s standard,” Chris reasoned. “The two of them were so close. They could sometimes talk without saying anything to each other. They had inside jokes and he never quite laughed as much when she was out on a job.”  
Allison thought that this all sounded a little strange but she decided against mentioning it.  
“She was just like him, you know? I didn’t realize it until her funeral. But that reckless fire and that stubbornness that was all him. He chose her to be built up in his image and she succeeded.”  
“Why her and not you?” This callous thing she did say while pressing the button.  
“I’ve always wondered that.”  
“Dad?”  
“Yes?”  
“I’m glad you’re not.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “You’re a better father than he ever was. And I’m glad.” She thought of her mother in black holding back tears and her father not crying at his own sister’s, wife’s, and finally father’s deaths. Then she thought of Scott and him holding close to his mother while they both cried. Allison remembered thinking how beautiful Scott looked then because she had never seen a boy cry before. Then, when she saw Isaac weeping too in her lap she felt the same way. Their sadness was, indeed, sad, but it was so glorious the way they allowed themselves to feel it, and in such different ways too. Scott cried like it had never occurred to him not to and Isaac cried as if he’d been told he couldn’t all his life and someone had finally said “it’s all right”. She knew then that no one had ever said that to her father. Like Isaac’s father, Gerard must have threatened him for such weakness.  
“What tree are you in, Dad?”  
“Look to your left.” She did and saw him subtly waving a hand at her. She smiled and waved back her heavy winter coat making a scratching noise as it moved against itself. “You are crying.”  
“Yeah. I am,” She admitted. “Are you?”  
She saw him press the walkie to his lips and take several deep breaths. Then he pulled it away and spoke into it “Yes.”  
“Good,” was all she said and for a few more hours while they waited for a doe to wonder near them they told stories and cried together and it didn’t matter the amount of forest and trees between them. They were not alone.


End file.
